Customer Reviews

Choteau Creek: A Sioux Reminiscence

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This is a truly tremendous book! Among my personal list of favorites. I found this book quite by accident years ago in a local bookstore and it continues to impact me today. I recommend it wherever I go and have had my own teenage sons and other family members read it. It should be on high school and college reading lists. The style is simple yet heartfelt. The themes so meaningful yet rare in todays world. Themes such as real character, unselfishness, solid role models, tradition, and attachment to place are woven throughout the text. Read it!

I am reminded of a saying I once heard: People may come to dinner, but a true friend helps you wash the dishes. This book presents friends. I can picture Grandma as she tells stories of her childhood or humbly contemplates the meaning of the owl's call. She remains with me after the book is finished. This is a good book for those who need to see the beauty and small acts of kindness and generosity that are triumphant in the face of hardship.

Choteau Creek: A Sioux Reminiscence by Joseph Iron Eye Dudley was an easy read, and I was almost turned off by the simple and straightforward style. However, in the end, it is what made the book so enchanting. There were no hidden agendas or questions left unanswered- just a simple story of a man's childhood filled with people everyone should be lucky enough to learn from. This is not to say the book did not deal with deep issues, just that the way they were presented was very easy to grasp. But then again, I would hope the love felt in this book was always this simple and wonderful.

I had to read this book for a class, and it's definitely better than most of the required reading I've had. If you like F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger, where there is no action but it's a very enriching experience for the character, then you will probably like the book. If you like Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy and are stupid like 90% of everybody else out there, then you probably won't.

This Sioux Indian family is typical of the plight of Native Americans who live on the fringes of society in extreme poverty. In writing to friends and relatives in the area (my in-laws homestead nearby), I found that there are three crosses signifying graves on the site of the shack in which Joseph lived with his grandparents. A resident has roped off the area to preserve it, altho there is nothing else left of the home. Cousins who lived near Choteau Creek remember the Church and School (still standing). One man knew the name of the pilot who flew groceries to the stranded families in 1945.
In searching for Joseph Dudley's present location in order to compliment him on his book, I coincidentally found his obituary in the Chamberlain, SD, newspaper and on the funeral home website in Sioux Falls, SD.
A few months ago a complete stranger e-mailed and said that he and his wife were going to travel to the site from Minnesota.
The life and words of Joseph Dudley will affect many readers. It is an accurate account of many Indian families who live, and often continue to live below the poverty line. Their ability to share their meagre assets sets an example for the rest of us.